D.S.K. and La Différence

Agnès Giard, in her blog about “the planet sex” on the daily newspaper Libération’s Web site, reported yesterday that, upon the initiative of a feminist organization,

On the night of June 6-7, the sidewalks of French cities will be decorated with stencilled drawings of vulvas, accompanied by the slogan “Liberate it!”

France’s culture is a profoundly eroticized one; it’s worth referring to the view of a foreigner when that foreigner is an exquisite noticer, Isaac Babel, who, in his 1934 story set in Paris, “Rue Dante,” wrote,

From five to ten the groans of love used to send our hotel, the Hotel Danton, soaring through the air. Experts were at work in the bedrooms. Arriving in France convinced that the nation had gone to the dogs, I was not a little surprised by these labors of love. In our country a woman is not brought to such white heat; far from it.

He told the story of his neighbor, Jean Biénal, a car dealer and the lover of one Germaine, a shopgirl:

Her and Biénal’s days were Wednesday and Sunday. She would arrive at five o’clock. A moment later their room would resound with growls, the thud of falling bodies, cries of fright; and then the woman’s tender death agony would begin: “Oh, Jean… “

Sex and death are united not just in the Freudian netherworld but also in the Sadean corpus and, for that matter, in more prosaic realms of the French imagination. In 2003, the French rock singer Bertrand Cantat, one of the country’s most popular performers, beat his girlfriend, the actress Marie Trintignant, into a coma in a hotel room in Vilnius, Lithuania (she died in France shortly thereafter), and was sentenced to eight years in jail for her murder; transferred to prison in France, he was released in 2007 after serving half his sentence. He’s back in the news now, as he attempts to resume his career (and is finding his public appearances to be often unwelcome, particularly outside of France); at the site Rue89, Nolwenn Le Blevennec writes—in a piece revealingly titled “Eight Years Later, Bertrand Cantat Is Still Divisive”—that there are many who don’t merely condemn and blame the singer for his crime, such as the writer Muriel Cerf:

This untouchable story imposes on us a binary and Manichean way of thinking. It touches the intimate fiber of each of us: who has never had a murderous impulse?

Le Blevennec adds that “At Libération, the journalists are divided into two irreconcilable camps: those (the management, among others) who saw in this story yet another example of the violence done to women, and those who think, on the contrary, that it is a singular story, outside the norm.” I remember that, at the time of Cantat’s trial, there was much ink spilled in France to the effect that what goes on in private between lovers is incommensurably intimate and can’t be judged from without—Le Blevennec alludes to those who “evoke a singular story, a destructive passion, an irrevocable gesture, and the right to forgiveness.”

In France, attitudes toward sex—with the implicit involvement of domination and submission in desire, of pain in pleasure, and of violence in love—tend to be psychologically complex, ambiguous, and, as such, resistant to morality. And France is a much more hierarchical society than the United States; even though there’s no longer an official aristocracy, there is an aristocracy of merit (there is, for instance, a Pantheon in the heart of Paris). Putting these factors together—along with a third, suspicion of the United States—it’s not a surprise that fifty-seven per cent of French people polled on Monday consider Dominique Strauss-Kahn to be the victim of a set-up.

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.